Going a few times a year into mountains which always felt amazing but also needed a lot of self-convincement to really go out.

This resulted in a breakdown of the sense of life, self-doubt, sickness, health problems, increased neck/shoulder and back problems, and panic and fear of uncertainty and other random things.

What’s the point of life if it’s just work and watching TV?

I felt that purpose is missing in my life.

Since then, I changed my life a lot. I’m still not entirely sure if it’s all the best things to do but it feels a lot better than before.

What changed

I reflected a lot on what my current life looked like. This wasn’t just fun, in fact this can be emotionally hard.

For me, I realized that I’m not happy with my current life and lifestyle.

I realized that I want to be more outdoors, I’m trapped in the virtual world of Computers and TV and have a love and hate relationship with being lazy watching TV.

I realized that the flat I was living in, in the center of the city, limited me in what I wanted to do. Being outside required me to drive for at least half an hour by car. The life in the city was anonymous and stressful. And, very importantly I realized that all the advantages a city gives I didn’t use much and haven’t even appreciated them.

With my partner I discussed this over weeks, and we decided it’s time to give up our individual flats and move together. We also decided we both want to live a bit more outside of the city. Luckily, we found a lovely place which belongs to the partner of my best friend. It was farer away from the city than we aimed but we loved the village immediately and the flat as well. And living there while having friends around is very helpful. That decision changed everything.

Explore new things

Do you know how to use a chainsaw? How to cut a tree? How to saw and crack firewood so we can use it in an oven?

Have you driven a tractor ever in your life?

Have you visited a forest from an owner’s point of view?

Have you renovated a house before?

Have you grown your own food?

Me neither. From my father I have learned the basics of woodworking and a couple of more practical things. But this has been over a decade ago and I slowly lost much of this knowledge.

Over the past two years, I learned to do all that. I’m no expert at this but I explored so many different things, types of work and get to know people with very different jobs to mine.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Diversity in Life

Personally, I definitely profited a lot from this diversification in my life. I love knowing more about how humans live, how we need a lot of skills to live on our own and I realised how, alternatively, dependent we are on other people like farmers and other craftspeople.

I learned how to grow food in a sustainable, organic way. This now makes it more difficult to buy normal stuff in supermarkets. I know how bad they’ve been grown and how much of a difference it would make if all food would be grown differently. Not only for our climate but also for the taste of the individual food.

Yes, I just ate homemade, homegrown Sauerkraut two weeks ago for the first time and am amazed how different and much better it is even compared to the one I can buy from a local organic vegetables farmer.

I don’t need to buy the very expensive wood from a store (or cheaper and better from a farmer nearby) but am able to produce this on my own.

So where’s the downside? Time and effort.

All of this takes a lot of time, effort, patience and the willingness to do this stuff.
It’s fun the first time you work with a chainsaw but it’s just a hell of a lot of work and your muscles will hurt a lot when you need to cut 5 trees and bring them out of the forest in one day (due to bug plagues, as owner you’re obliged to do this as soon as you know about it).

There are phases where you struggle to find the time for all the various work at home while you still need to get your daily job — sounds amazing that it’s still web development, right? — done.

What’s your recommendation now?

All the struggles I face today, less time for work, less time for leisure time are easily forgotten when I’m in my garden, in the forest, sit in front of my fireplace. In these moments, I’m grateful for what I have, what I can do here, where I live and to those who enable and support me with my lifestyle. In these moments I feel real happiness.

I rarely go into the mountains anymore as I have nice, relaxing places near my home.

But nearly every day I’m reminded that this is only one side of life. I still have a job to earn money, and to be honest it’s a job I still love. I love web development, working with all of you, writing content for the web and so on and so on…

But since I have more things to do besides my Computer, I struggle a bit more with motivation for work that isn’t interesting or fun. This is part of everybody’s job but knowing so many things you could do instead of this work now isn’t helpful to do such stuff.

I’m constantly getting more ideas, more creativity, different ways to think about problems by my new activities. This helps me finding better solutions or understanding the struggles of users a lot better. As my life if happier and I feel more aligned with my purpose of life, my work profits from it as well. Just not in every moment.

Explore things, you don’t have to move outside of the city or follow any of my described paths. This is my path and the only thing I want to recommend you is to allow yourself to find your own path. Take the time for this and then slowly change if necessary. If you’re already happy and comfortable, that’s great. And from time to time, reflect on what you do, on your work, on life and calm your mind. Accept that your life cannot be led by other people’s stories, Instagram photos but is yours. And that is fine.

]]>Building a Bedhttps://helloanselm.com/writings/building-a-bed
writings/building-a-bedFri, 12 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000This project I had in mind for over a year already. It would be my dream to build my own bed and the concept was shaped over one year until I realized that this year I would have to make that real or it would never happen. So I started getting serious about the planning, draw construction sketches and talked with several people who know more than me about wood construction. This already was an amazing research and made me happy as I had so much to learn. But a bit of anxiety also grew as I realized that building a bed is something totally different than any of these smaller wood project’s I’ve done so far.

One of the goals was to learn a lot more about working with wood and the tools. Another one was to build a bed from and with wood only—no metal, no screw built-in. When you think of this, it first seems not hard but the little details make you realize why most beds include some metal parts (mostly for the links in the corners). Lastly, I planned to use some wood that I’ve never worked with, a local wood available in Germany—Ash.

Again, I had no real clue how to work with Ash wood. But I found a very nice dealer who let me choose the planks which still had dull edges. At that point I realized how much work this project would be and what nice kind of wood I’d chosen here.

How do you transform a rough plank into a ready to use wooden board? Theoretically I knew about this but I realized that doing that at home with my limited toolset (which in fact is not very limited but also no joiner workshop) this wouldn’t be possible.
Luckily, the carpenter nearby agreed to help me and together we cut the boards on their big panel saw and sent it through the thicknessing planer.

It’s easy to think that using the circular saw or overhead template router is the best option.
What I realized though is how important and useful manual tools are, especially when it’s a difficult step.

When I planned the bed I thought most steps would be done with some machinery.
It’s easy to think that using the circular saw or overhead template router is the best option.
What I realized though is how important and useful manual tools are, especially when it’s a difficult step.

I learned to hand-plane, I learned how to use my Japanese saws properly and many many other things.
I learned how relaxing using hand-tools is in comparison to the loud and fast machines.
In the end, I think I’ve manufactured about 60% with manual tools and about 40% with electric help.

So what was the price for this, you may wonder. The goal was not to produce a bed that’s cheaper than if I’d bought an comparable bed.
The goal was to learn a lot from this project and to build the bed exactly how I imagined it to be.
That allowed me to buy a lot of useful tools that I didn’t have before and could make use of in future as well.
Even with a new sanding-machine, a couple of Japanese and European manual planes, a new saw, a couple of drills, a milling cutter for the wood connectors I ended up being at about the same price as a bought bed.

The finish of the bed is a natural oil (“Auro Hartöl”).

The entire bed took me about (estimated) 100 hours of work.
For me it’s not a lot—I enjoyed most of the time and learned so much.

Now here are some (random) pictures of how it’s made and how it looks like now.

]]>“Our lives are overfull.”https://helloanselm.com/writings/paring-down-your-life
writings/paring-down-your-lifeThu, 11 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Do you know the feeling of being overwhelmed by all the work and tasks you have to do today?
There are times where I manage all this very good and then there are times where I struggle a lot with “getting everything done”.
But when I really think about what is important, what needs to be finished today it’s usually very little.
If I need to choose two things to finish on a day, it’s doable. The problem is we constantly add more tasks all the time during the day.

We say yes to invitations and commitments, we answer as many emails and messages as we can, we join courses and groups, buy books and take on new hobbies, get involved in new relationships and buy more stuff.—Leo Babauta

I want to get better at learning how to live a simpler life.
A life with more purpose, with clear priorities and calmer days that don’t mix up topics as much as they do nowadays.

You can’t act on your desires alone. You have to contemplate the details of what needs to be removed and what needs to be cultivated.—Chogyam Trungpa

We need to decide what to remove from our life, and we need to cultivate the things that we love.
Cultivating things works by making them the number one priority for a dedicated time.
I’ll try to adopt this and get better not struggling with “getting everything done”.

]]>Does the individual matter if only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of CO2 emissions?https://helloanselm.com/writings/70percent-co2-emissions-from-100-companies
writings/70percent-co2-emissions-from-100-companiesWed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Today I came across an article about a study (PDF) that found out that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions.

The source who lead me to this interesting article also mentioned there’d be a “hard limit to how much of an effect lifestyle changes alone can have”.
This assumes that there is no relation between these companies and the individual.

Who These Companies Are

Let’s have a look at who these hundred companies effectively are and why they produce so much emissions:

About every sixth company on the list is a coal company which is used to produce energy for our homes and our workplaces, or e.g. server farms.
If we’d all pay for renewable energy, starting at home, we’d eliminate most of these companies and thus the emissions (which are easily more than 20%) of them already.

Next up, and this about every second company on the list are oil companies. What do we need oil for as individuals? First of all—cars.
Nearly all cars all over the world are running on oil-based fuel.

Airplanes only fly if we feed them with kerosine. And many house-heatings are burning oil to produce heat. Finally, most plastics are made of oil. If we drive less with our cars, share our cars, switch to
smaller cars, fly less, and avoid plastic packaging we’d limit the CO2 emissions. If the companies we lead or work for would do the same,
we’d be easily reduce the carbon footprint by such a high number that our climate would be safe again.

Sure, there’s one more on the list: Gas. We also use it mostly for heating, for some cars, and for technical applications.

“If we don’t consume any goods from these Top 100 companies, we reduce CO2 emissions by 71%.”

The Role Of The Individual

Overall this comes down to the individuals who drive cars, who have a non-renewable energy heating and power their homes, offices and
datacenters with non-renewable energy. If we as individuals can manage to avoid all these companies on the list, our climate would
get about 71% less CO2 emissions. This is currently not possible or would be incredibly hard to achieve but every lifestyle change that
reduces the consumption of petroleum-based products makes a huge impact on our planet’s climate. Which is at high risk.
It looks like we have 11 more years to reduce our emissions back to a level that temperature rises only 1.5 degree until 2100.

Planet earth will not suffer, it can deal with climate change and adapt—but humans will.

Otherwise not only our children but we will soon experience the irreversible effects of climate change. Planet earth will not suffer, it can deal with climate change and adapt—we will.
Climate change is only bad for us humans (and some other species, of course) but not the planet will deal with it as it has done so in the past.
Humans will suffer first and then go extinct. I think it’s as easy as that and if we don’t want this, we need to act quickly and fully as individuals.

One more thing

We need to stop investing into these companies.
When we buy investment fonds, most of them invest heavily in oil/gas/coal and also arms industry companies.
We all want to save money but at which cost? Let’s choose greener options, there are fonds that are not harming the planet or humanity as much while being as profitable as ‘traditional’ ones.

]]>Morning in the Foresthttps://helloanselm.com/writings/morning-in-the-forest
writings/morning-in-the-forestFri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Today I got up early and instead of cooking a coffee and then sit in front of my screen to read emails I went out to the forest. There’s nothing more relaxing than the early hours in a forest, especially in autumn when fog is around and there’s only nature and you.]]>Apple’s Environment Reporthttps://helloanselm.com/writings/apple-resources
writings/apple-resourcesThu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Today I read Apple’s Environment Responsibility Report 20181.
I’m amazed how detailed it is, how readable, understandable and exemplary it is. It’s not just a official report that is necessary.

Instead, they chose to make it great for everyone and use it as marketing instrument.

Instead, they chose to make it great for everyone and use it as marketing instrument. And I like that because it makes the resource available to
so many more people who might be interested in these numbers. It has an impact to other companies who see how Apple is successful with their strategy
and that putting effort into renewable energy and recycling is valued by customers.

When I bought my recent MacBook Pro I was thinking it’s the best option environment-wise. I’m not 100% sure at the moment because
after only 5 months, my keyboard had to be replaced which included a new battery, keyboard, USB ports and much more (they’re all glued together).
I think that’s not good and they could do better. Today I reached out to Apple’s head of Environment Responsibility and asked for a statement regarding that.
I also think the push to always buy the latest new iPhone is extremely bad for our environment and Apple contributes to this problem a lot.

But overall they’re still one of the best options if you want to buy environment friendly electronics. Apple is far from being
a really responsible, enviromentally non-impacting company but if you buy electronics, chances are high you won’t get anything better.2

… it’s generally a good idea to make the most of what you need to do anyway.

Back to the Environment Report itself: I think the design of it and how it’s written is a great example of combining necessary effort
and making use of this as informative marketing material. Most companies split these kind of things but it’s generally a good idea to
make the most of what you need to do anyway.

<p>To be clear about these kind of documents: It’s not something that is optional for such companies. Several governments and <abbr title="Non-Governmental Organizations">NGOs</abbr> require these reports from big companies.&#160;<a href="#fnref1:note1" rev="footnote" class="footnote-backref">&#8617;</a></p>

<p>There are companies that try their best to change electronics, for example <a href="https://www.fairphone.com/en/">Fairphone</a> who are building a modular phone where you can upgrade your camera individually. I’m speaking about big brands here who sell most of electronics world-wide, such as Samsung, LG, HP, and similar vendors.&#160;<a href="#fnref1:note2" rev="footnote" class="footnote-backref">&#8617;</a></p>

]]>My <s>new</s> iPhone 7https://helloanselm.com/writings/iphone-7
writings/iphone-7Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000When Apple presented the iPhone Xr this year I was tempted to buy it as soon as possible.
This was in total contrast to what I wanted to do before the announcement—not buying a new phone this year.

Every two years my contract with Vodafone renews and gives me the chance to get a new smartphone.
And every time Apple holds a keynote they achieve to convince people that their new product is more amazing
than what we currently have. I have an iPhone 7 and it still feels great.

The new iPhone Xr I’d mainly bought for its camera.
In fact, I upgraded from the iPhone 5 to 6 for the camera.
I upgraded from the iPhone 6 to the 7 for the camera.

But let’s face the fact. I have a 120cm x 80cm gloss-paper landscape nature photo hanging in my bedroom
that shows no pixels or artifacts and has an amazing brilliance. I’d say it’s no different than a bought
photo from a professional. And as I had found out during printing, this was captured on my iPhone 6.

When I struggled whether to upgrade from the 7 to the Xr, I realized it would be a better camera but I don’t need it.
I have a Nikon D500 which is a professional camera and an iPhone with a camera that already has an amazing capabilities.

Last week I renewed my contract. I decided to keep my two years old phone. This now saves me 46€ each month.
My invoice will drop from 78€ to 33€ each month for the same data and phone plan.

I’m glad I made this decision but I admit it was hard.

]]>15 Minutes On The Bushttps://helloanselm.com/writings/solving-problems-remotely-on-the-bus
writings/solving-problems-remotely-on-the-busFri, 20 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000On Wednesday I was asking a colleague what his plans
for today are and he replied that he’s on his way to go surfing but would have
about 15 minutes to talk about our project now if I like.

I thought that’s way enough time to talk about task management etc and called him
while he was on the bus to the beach. But I was wrong; he didn’t wanted to talk
about tasks but about our problem of the last three days—a release blocker that
had already cost us hours of work with no solution.

But after only five minutes we together came up with an interesting idea that I
immediately tried out. And after two more iterations we found the fix to our
Postgres query.

This is a story how we fixed a complex task while one of us sat in a bus without
a computer in 15 minutes. I love working remotely because it enables us to
think about problems differently and to try out new ways of working. That
afternoon, I celebrated the success and went biking in my home mountains.

It baffles me that a billion dollar company cannot come up with a better vision than to compare itself and copy
a concept from Amazon. Shira Ovide from Bloomberg tends to agree
but Uber still is valued billions of Dollars and while not profitable at all, still gets a lot of investment money.

Our economy isn’t interested in finding new, inspirational or ground-breaking solutions—it’s interested in a return of money.
Inspiration needs to come from the heart of a founder or CEO. And from customers, from people who trade with stocks. Only they
can influence what becomes successful. We can change the world with our money.

You in business? What are you doing to last? Not to grow. Not to gain. Not to take. Not to win. But to last? —Jason Fried in Outlasting

It describes the way I build software and websites since ever — building a thing that lasts for as long as I can imagine it to last.
In the past, I related this to how I create a codebase so that it lasts for years and will be reliable and readable by other people
when I’m not on that project anymore. These days I think about my own company—Colloq.

Have a Vision

Colloq is a project right to my heart. I’ve spent countless hours already on it and with Tobias and Holger I’ve created a platform
for accessing events and event content in an easier way. When we made things official and talked about how we want to do business,
we all imagined the service to be available for the next decades. We didn’t want to build something and sell it to the highest bidder
but to build something that makes us happy to work on for the next years and pays our bills.

On Competition

We often get asked whether we’re a replacement for [Service X] and while such comparisons are good for people who don’t know us yet,
our goal was never to copy and replace another service.

I wouldn’t advocate spending much time worrying about the competition — you really shouldn’t waste attention worrying about things you can’t control — but if it helps make the point relatable, the best way to beat the competition is to last longer than they do.
—Jason Fried in Outlasting

For Colloq, we have a vision about what it should be and how we want to create a sustainable, ethical business that lasts. I think it’s important to have your own vision if you want to be successful and build something that lasts for long.

Patience

One of the hard lessons you learn when you start an online business is patience. In times of smartphones with (virtual) assistants
for nearly everything who can give you a mostly instant reply to your questions, we have a tough time to be patient.

Most of us constantly forget that some things need time. We forget that while going to the mountains, practicing meditation and yoga
but struggle to not expect instant feedback. One of these things that take time is building a business. When I opened up my first business
11 years ago, things were different but it took me three years to get to a point where the business was really and sufficiently profitable.
Building an online service with three people is even harder as we need to earn money for three and not only one persons. We also need
to save some money for the company itself to keep it running.

Not having thousands of paying customers after merely 7 months of is just normal. Not even the considered “most successful” companies had that.
Building reputation takes time and if you’re going the hard path and market your product with honesty and real facts takes even longer. Building
a quality product is difficult — from planning over crafting it to market it to customers. We can understand why some hand-crafted tools like a
Japanese wood chisel set of 6 chisels can easily cost thousands of Dollars.
It takes time to produce these things, it’s a limited production and the tools need to be of excellent quality.

The Cost Factor

Jason Fried writes about this adequately:

Whenever a startup goes out of business, the first thing I get curious about are their costs, not their revenues. If their revenues are non-existent, or barely there, then they were fucked anyway. But beyond that, the first thing I look at is their employee count. Your startup with 38 people didn’t make it? No wonder. —Jason Fried in Outlasting

A few weeks ago I wrote a Colloq blog post about saving costs that explains how we saved $5 per month and become more sustainable again.
People ask whether we would hire more people or why we don’t use [Service Y] for that but build our own tools; What often is neglected that if you don’t have large investment, you
don’t have a choice about these decisions. We simply can’t afford hiring someone else because the fund currently only pay a bit more than our technical costs we have. Our goal is not to get rich but to pay ourselves a fair and reasonable wage for the next decades.
In order to do that, we not only need to acquire users who find it worth paying for our service but also need to save money wherever we can. Building our own tools is not free (time) but doesn’t affect our account’s balance.

Thanks Jason for the inspiring read where I could find so many things I have in my mind affirmed by someone who is successful following these rules.

Have an event that could get promotion or need tools that aid you organizing it? Or want to find events to go to and get inspired by their coverage? All you need is signing up for Colloq.

]]>🤔 Ask Product Hunt: “<a href="https://www.producthunt.com/ask/8776-what-are-the-most-inspiring-sustainable-ethical-companies">What are the most inspiring sustainable, ethical companies?</a>”https://helloanselm.com/writings/ph-ask-the-community-ethical-products
writings/ph-ask-the-community-ethical-productsMon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000I’m collecting a list of companies or products that are not only over-financed hipster brands but instead have a real purpose as a company to succeed and be sustainable from the start. Ideally, the companies or products should also care about ethics and mostly about the human side of their clients.

As an example, the outdoor company Patagonia would be an example of a sustainable company which cares about the environment, the future of people and takes a lot of responsibility for what they do. They also ask themselves a lot of ethical questions and often go the hard miles to improve supply chains which “no one” did before.

If you know such brands, companies or products, please let me know. If you want to know more of these, spread the word and help me get this list full of amazing people and brands.

]]>New look for this sitehttps://helloanselm.com/writings/new-look-new-site
writings/new-look-new-siteFri, 15 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000As you can already see this site has gotten a new look yesterday. But not only a new look but a new technical basis and a new content strategy.

In the past I had a website showing what I do as developer. But I am much more than a developer and people want to know about it as well.
In times where you know a lot of people virtually from Twitter or other social media networks, it’s even more interesting what people do besides
their main profession. To show this, I spent a lot of time into how I could represent much more than development stuff on my personal website.

Four main sections

I now have four main sections, the first one being “About” which tells people more about me, mostly professionally but with some personal details as well.
This is for people who want to hire me, who want me to write or speak for them. This is for people who want to be inspired by my career or how I live a life of responsibility.

The next section is dedicated to my development work and shows what I’ve been doing so far, who some of my clients are and what I do as (frontend) developer.
This section will get more love soon so it’s easier and nicer to get an overview. So far it’s only a transfer of what I already had on the previous website.

An entirely new section is “Photography”, something mostly unknown to most people who know me from my professional life. I’ve been doing photography since over fifteen years now,
with a variety of analogue and digital cameras, have even written my “high-school thesis” about portrait photography, did an exhibition with manually (at home in a small laboratory) developed
black-and-white photographs and published a book about portrait photography. Since two years I decided to pick this hobby up again a bit more and now also offer photo shootings
and sell licenses for my photographs to clients. If you’re interested, visit my photography page or contact me directly.

Lastly, my writings section now contains all written articles, notes and other content that previously was spread in various places. You can now easily decide what to read or
read everything in one place. At the moment I’m not offering separate feeds yet (only the main feed) but this is already planned.

I’m sure there are a few bugs left and will continue working on this site again more frequently but hope you like the restructuring.
—Anselm

]]>Don’t ruin your calming practice right afterwardshttps://helloanselm.com/writings/meditating-rush-to-work
writings/meditating-rush-to-workFri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Today I read an interview which I really enjoyed. It contained some great inspiration tipps but one thing is still stuck in my head:

Try to establish a day led by your meditation practice—calm, focused, reflected.

]]>Decentralized won’t fix unethical behaviorhttps://helloanselm.com/writings/on-decentralized
writings/on-decentralizedFri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000I’m a big fan of decentralized solutions and advocate for them a lot. But the claim by technologists for building decentralized services as a response to unethical behavior is wrong. If we try to solve the underlying humanitarian issue with technology, nothing changes. Decentralized services are a good idea to share responsibility and own your data. But they’re not going to prevent people from abusing technology for harvesting user data.

It’s a common misunderstanding that decentralized services can’t be evil. But this is only based on the idealism by the people who build these solutions. Some advantages that decentralized services have is that they make it harder to put censorship rules in place. They also allow people to own their data. But nothing prevents people from tracking your behavior, serving fake news, or selling your data. It sometimes can be even much harder to identify such issues in a decentralized service.

The decentralized service allows everyone to run their own service. In reality, there are a handful of instances that serve the majority of users. At this point, the service is only theoretically decentralized. In practice, the only difference to a centralized place is that people can choose between a couple of services to join.
The tricky part is that every instance decides their rules on their own. So whether the service is placing ads, tracking scripts, or removes sensitive content is up to the instance owner. It’s not easy to find out whether an instance is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ one. Especially for non-tech people who aren’t able to dig into the source code and read the network traffic this can be impossible.

Don’t get me wrong, please: I value the goal behind building more decentralized services. It helps the Internet to get more independent again.

]]>You design your servicehttps://helloanselm.com/writings/you-design-your-service
writings/you-design-your-serviceThu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Facebook’s Press Release after the Cambridge Analytica story unfolded is one perfect way to show how the whole company thinks. While it’s clear that Facebook didn’t follow their claim to “Protecting people’s information is the most important thing we do at Facebook.”, they declare it Cambridge Analytica’s fault that they used data that Facebook and their users gave them unnecessarily. The whole story is about how you design your own service and how you enforce your values and ethics in your company.

With Facebook, it’s relatively easy to see where they come from and what their main goal ever was and still is: Farming their users to make money with their data. Aral Balkan shared this years ago already but today we see the direct evidence and results of it. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook even said once: “They [Facebook’s users] trust me — dumb fucks”. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook because he wanted to stalk some specific people at his university and get data from them. Now that you know some history about the service, do you still see it as a service that has the indication to help you or humanity? With the knowledge that they can identify nakedness and other inappropriate content very well but claim to struggle identifying violent and harrassive, or even fake news posts—do you still trust them that it’s their intention to remove such content? Consider that Facebook makes money with posts that get a lot of views, and now think how many views a fake news video might get over a neutrally, real video. It gets clearer that it’s not in Facebook’s interest (and feel free to port that over to YouTube and similar services as well) to remove such content.

Now let’s reflect how services are built. Nowadays, a lot of products are built with a business plan that doesn’t make points on how to earn actual money. Instead, the goal is to raise money from any venture capital investor to fund the company idea. Often people don’t look what the investors do, if they invest in war-machinery, in data-farming technology, in surveillance. But what if we would ensure that our company can share our values, and is built with our users in mind? It’s unlikely that we would end with an app that asks for continuous location data, continuously syncs the address book. And it probably won’t state in the terms and conditions and the privacy policy that the data gathered is shared with third-parties and used to earn money.

If we build our company with capital that works in line with our ethical values, the product can be a real, reliable help to people. The capital itself can be our own or from the seldom investor who has ethical values that help humanity. I know this is hard work but there’s one question you need to ask yourself. Is your intention to make quick money or to build a service that helps people and finances your life over the next decade(s)? If it’s the latter, better spend a few more months into building exactly what you want instead of selling the product you love to someone else.

I haven’t spoken to Brian Acton, the former co-founder of Whatsapp myself but now he publicly told people that “it’s time to delete Facebook”. I don’t believe he’s still happy that he sold Whatsapp when he says something like that and now works on privacy technologies such as Signal. So even with billions in your pocket—what are they worth if you know they’re dirty money and you only have it because you sold other people’s data? The imagination to not working anymore once you have enough money is illusional. You can see that when looking at all the ‘successful’ founders who sold their companies for a lot of money. Almost all of them continue working on different products now and will work until they’re 60 or 70 years old as well. I know these realistic views aren’t catchy and might not be as attractive as being ‘famous’, earning millions. But only when you’re realistic about yourself, your life, and where your money comes from you will live a true happy life.

“I know that I am responsible for what I work on”

It’s you who designs your service. If you’re an engineer, it’s you who builds the API and the permission model which third-party gets access to which data. If you’re a designer, it’s you who designs the interface to ensure people understand what they’re doing when granting access. If you’re part of the company, it’s you who decides whether the service will work when users block Google Analytics or Crashlytics. It’s you who decides which data the service really needs. If we start with that in mind, it doesn’t matter if I’m working for someone else or myself. I know that I am responsible for what I work on.

Something I said yesterday during a meeting and only later realized the true value of it and its meaning.

]]>Making Things <strong>Better</strong>https://helloanselm.com/writings/making-things-better
writings/making-things-betterWed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000When you build something, it’s hard to decide whether it’s good enough or not to release it to the public. But improving something is even harder due to the infinity of possible solutions. This is known as the common issue of not being able to validate a change binary:

A common approach to problem solving is to consider it binary. Either you’ve fixed the issue or you haven’t. Some problems fit that domain well: Either the calculator returns 2 on 1 + 1 or it doesn’t. There really isn’t much of a middle ground.
—David Heinemeier-Hansson in Are we making it better?

In fact, most things we do aren’t binary. Software bugs breaking things are. But for most other things we face a variety of solutions:
We can improve things a bit, refactor the code, rebuild everything or even remove a feature. All valid solutions but which is the right one?

When we know how to build a better user interface, is it okay to apply a simple fix to the current design? Shouldn’t we spend more work and build the best product?

It’s hard to be a product manager and one can run into traps to over-think topics very easily. But what definitely helps is reflecting on where we come from:

If we can build something that improves the current state, the result will be better. This simple trick changes the way we think about solutions:

(…) focus on mere progress instead: Are we making it better? (…) No longer does an idea have to contend with being The Solution, it simply has to contend with making things better.

Building things is easy. Improving it is hard. We need to find out how to make difficult decisions easier to make progress.

]]><s>KISS</s> or <s>YAGNI</s>: Avoid acronyms and abbreviations if you want to be liked.https://helloanselm.com/writings/acronyms
writings/acronymsFri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Here’s a bold statement: Using acronyms is hurting people.

Elon Musk already declared a company rule effective for all employees in 2010,
effectively ending the use of acronyms and appreviations for the entire company:

“Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.”

And it’s true. I cannot count the times where I felt extremely dumb because people wrote an acronym to me and I had no clue what it means.
It felt like I had missed out something, that I’m not part of some inner circle that clearly knows what this means.

I also had this vice-versa: Me writing LGTM in a Pull Request only to receive a private message by the creator of the patch asking
what this actually means. This felt extremely odd to me, making me the one creating exclusitvity.

As developers we tend to apply abbreviations everywhere: const f = 'foo'.
One abbreviation is even built into the language const instead of constant, while the other one is arbitrarily introduced so we have less to write.
But these abbreviations make code much harder to read and for new colleagues this might give them a hard time reading or modifying your code.
It’s interesting to see that we’re creating lot of documentation to improve code quality and make it understandable while we would have a much more
powerful tool available: Writing understandable code.

I actually love a lot of stuff that has recently been added to ECMAScript but there are things that bother me:

let arr = [20, 10, 5, 10];
const arrMax = arr => Math.max(...arr)

This is seen as much easier to read but I know a lot of people who wouldn’t have a clue what this means. There are so many
implicit things happening here, starting by abbreviating array to arr to implicitly creating a function by using Arrow function and
finally by using a spread operator inside another function. By now you need to understand three more tools available in a language
to being able to understand what’s happening here.

Keep it simple stupid, people, and whatever “YAGNI” means that I just read in another article today.
Be a good colleague and write understandable language, avoid acronyms in your normal language, your written conversations and in your code.

“(…) our global spread means almost 24/7, Slack is a hub of activity and people feel they’re missing out on work. This is especially tough on our Asia-Pacific teammates, who end up left out of discussions and conversations, and folks with responsibilities who needed to work different hours and be offline during parts of their workday (like parents!).”

I’m so familiar with this feeling. I experience and observe this in various teams and projects and it doesn’t matter if you use Slack or something similar. People tend to lock themselves into addictive behavior,
and Slack is simply one of them.

As a freelancer you often switch projects on a daily or even faster basis. While this can keep your job quite interesting, it’s incredibly hard to manage communication with the various teams.
I’m regularly part of a development team in other companies, and as such I want and need to have conversations with other people. People ask me stuff, I ask them stuff. Nowadays I’m glad this doesn’t
happen via Email anymore but we have tools such as Slack that make it very comfortable to communicate and enable remote teams to do their jobs better. However, there’s a key issue here that Katie is mentioning as well:

“Creating a calm, uninterrupted environment is important in an engineering team, but even more important is inclusivity to all our teammates.

Slack often does exactly the opposite. It’s not necessarily Slack’s fault, it’s how we as human beings behave. Tools like Slack allow us to write messages 24/7 which is great because
regardless of where I am and when I do work or something comes to my mind I can post it and can be sure that the message is not getting lost and can be read by everyone. The issue is that people
tend to read it immediately, they tend to enable push notifications for everything and have a constant fear of “missing out”.
Also, a lot of people tend to interpret communication guidelines quite differently resulting in @channel notifications for relatively irrelevant messages while others don’t notify people even if it’s a quite important note they make.

So Katie made an experiment of turning off notifications for a week and shares that she’s super happy. Here’s the thing: I did that for various times and as of today I still am unable to apply these settings constantly and forever. I see value in being notified about specific important things and there are various cases where people complained about me not being available or replying to their messages (simply because I forgot about it). I’d love to see Slack being better at supporting me to remind me to reply to messages I’ve just read but don’t want to reply immediately. I’d love to see people having an easier time and getting used to communicating asynchronously. Here’s Katie’s most important statement to finish this note:

“I want to create a workplace where everyone feels free be offline and do their thing, and feels confident and safe that their manager and teammates trust them to get on with their work. The trend of important conversations moving to asynchronous tools or to specific scheduled meetings means decisions are more intentional and thoughtful. It’s calmer, there’s less guilt involved, and it’s more inclusive.”

]]><strong>Ethical Design</strong> And Sustainability On The Webhttps://helloanselm.com/writings/whats-behind-ethical-design
writings/whats-behind-ethical-designFri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ethical Design is a term often used by various people in the past year and now even predicted as a trend for 2018. Interestingly, when you read more about what it means you get a variety of responses. It lasts from the user experience over sustainability to business concepts. And in fact, it’s a mixture of all and cannot be a trend—instead it must be a requirement for us as human beings.

When we meet with our friends or close family members we want to be sure that we trust each other. This trust implies a lot of things: We imply that people don’t share the private communication with other people, we imply that the person I talk with tries to understand my position and will try to help me if I ask for help. We try to make things easier for each other and to eliminate and reduce blockers where and whenever possible.

Strangely, we show different behaviour at work. Suddenly, we discredit colleagues, we don’t value or trust their work, we envy their jobs, and we moan to everyone that we don’t get enough money and the job we do is too hard.
Employers on the other hand contribute their part to this phenomenon: They don’t make salaries public, they often don’t embrace communication, working together as a team, being open about business details and almost always fail at eliminating jealousy and mistrust between colleagues.

At work, we suddenly value ourselves much more than those who make use of our work. The biggest goal is to make life easier for us, with the effect that the people we work for, the people that buy products of the companies we work for are getting a worse product than possible. It’s important to us that we have a job that is as convenient as possible.

Seeing that the results are often unbearable when we are the ones who suffer from other people’s laziness lead people to rethink this pattern. That’s when “ethical design” became a term. When we objectively consider how helpful our work is to the people around us many of us realise that we could do much better work. The laziness, the selfishness suddenly becomes clearly visible and we notice that this is not what we wanted to do in our life.

But now comes the hard part—making a change, an impact that makes us happy at work again, something that shows that we’re doing something good at work, contribute to help other people in life is hard and often not a clear path. And this is where ethical design as a term gets confusing. It’s not about design by designers but about applying ethical decisions to a job. It affects everyone, yet not everyone has the choice to apply their ethical decisions to their job.

Today we can often hear that everyone can get the job they’re dreaming about. Yet, with people striving for a YouTube career, with people who live in real poverty this is simply not true. Not everyone will be able to be a successful YouTuber and it’s super hard and often requires privilege and connections to get there. Not everyone will be able to choose the job they can get—if you don’t have enough money to buy your daily food and water, you’ll not be in a position to be picky about the type of work you can do.

But there are ways to apply ethic decisions anyway—in any job. And those of us who work in a privileged job have the privilege to apply ethical decisions at a greater level.

So what does ethical design mean?

As company owners we can encourage our colleagues, our partners and our employees to work closer together. We should build a business out of people’s needs not to make profit from them without giving them back a real value. We should have the environment in mind for our business plan because without a working environment humans won’t be able to buy our products anymore. We should want to build businesses that last, businesses that are valued by customers and embraced. And we should build businesses with employees who are happy to work for us and don’t work alone for the money but see value in what they do. Let’s care about our business—our clients and employees are everything we have.

As people who work on a product we can influence the how. It’s up to us to implement solutions and we can question it. We can ask the right questions to challenge whether it’s a good idea to do that or whether we can do it differently. When we see an issue, we can raise it. Never assume that those who suggested a solution or write a task know everything. Very often, it happens that people writing tasks don’t know much about the implications of the task, the effort it takes versus the value it has. If we have evidence that there is a better solution, that a task doesn’t seem useful, we must challenge it. Talking about it with a colleague, finding a better solution—there are a variety of options to really improve a product instead of following the task. If we do it right, the people who give us the tasks will value our efforts, they will be happy to have learned something, to get better at their job.

Whether we improve a website’s performance, fix the markup to be accessible, to be cleaner, to be more maintainable, reduce page load to cut server costs, rethink a marketing campaign’s wording to be inclusive and non-discriminating, sell a product honestly—it all boils down to more happiness for us. As human being we want to be respected, we want to be valued, and we want to have friends. We can achieve this only by contributing to this, by seeking value in what we do. And what we do is work. If our work is successful, helps other people we will be rewarded—with respect, value, friendship, appreciation and a salary.
Ethical design means applying our ethics, our personality to what we do. Let’s do this. All together.